GStreamer is a powerful multimedia infrastructure for applications—providing a number of programming language constructs and bindings—but also provides easy-to-use rapid prototyping tools to test new multimedia pipelines. Additionally, Gstreamer usually has good support for Xiph-related formats.

Unfortunately, it can be rather difficult to figure out an appropriate pipeline without a starting point. This page is a collection of gst-launch pipelines that can be used on an as-needed basis.

Note that the above pipeline will slowly lose audio/video synchronization due to hardware-level limitations in audio vs. video capture of media samples. FireWire and SDI-based capture does not have these limitations.

Tested on an 2.4GHz Core i3 running at ≥2.0GHz. Both CPU cores should be at ~50% continuously-smooth utilization after the first ~15 seconds; battery-only power or overheating may throttle the CPU leading to dropped frames.

Set the camera to 2592x1120 @ 18FPS. Adjust camera controls to ensure the camera achieves this framerate.

Expect a ~50GB recording for 8hrs. of recording depending on image complexity. The Matroska recording may be viewed directly in VLC (≥2.0 recommended) and may be transcoded to commonly-used formats viaMiro Video Converter or Firefogg.